What is React?

React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. React is about building JavaScript driven apps. React apps run in the web browser, not on the server.

React basically is a component based architecture. In react we usually build the components to develop interactive UI. It is one of the most popular front end JavaScript library.

ReactJs is much faster compared to any other JavaScript frameworks because it makes use of virtual DOM which is JavaScript object and it reduces memory consumption and DOM manipulation which helps in the increase of application performance.

Let us take an example of the wire-frame in the below screenshot.

If we look at the wire frame we can divide the webpage into 4 different components like header, sidebar, headline etc.

Each component can consists its own html markup, css and it can have its own logic. Furthermore all these individual components can be integrated together to build an entire web application.

Advantages of using ReactJs

Likewise in a vanilla Javascript and HTML world maintaining the UI state becomes cumbersome and it becomes more difficult in maintaining if the application is highly dynamic for the front end developers.

Why react is awesome?

Highly efficient and faster web development

Virtual DOM

Reusable components

Easy to learn

Maintainability is easy

Easier Debugging with Chrome extensions

Easy to create UI test cases

Open source Facebook library

Active communities.

Disadvantages of ReactJs

Poor documentation

SEO issues – Google and other search engines had difficulty in indexing the react applications which has dynamic pages with client side rendering

Only View layers – React is a UI library, you still need to plug your code for ajax requests, event handlers and so on. Requires other libraries for state management

JSX hurdle– React uses JSX, its a syntax extension where you can mix HTML with JavaScript. Many developers has to get used to it.

Who developed React?

React is developed by Facebook. React was created by Jordan Walke, a software engineer at Facebook.

Who maintains React currently and what is the latest version of ReactJS?

React is maintained by Facebook and a group of individual developers and companies. It is consequently updated and the latest version of React is 16.5.2(the time post is created).

Is ReactJs Open source?

Yes, React is opensource library under MIT license. On September 23, 2017, Facebook announced that the following week, it would re-license Flow, Jest, React, and Immutable.js under a standard MIT License.